Find marketing intelligence and perform competitive monitoring

Understanding how your business is doing is critical, but just as important is understanding how your competition is doing! Competitive intelligence is the missing link in many business strategies and Automated Business Analysis can help.

How can you find marketing intelligence and perform competitive monitoring?

Unfortunately, your competition rarely publishes their plans and internal metrics for you to track. Instead, you need to sift through massive amounts of data to find indications of their strategies and their impact. Here’s where to look:

Advertising. Tools like the Google Keyword Planner let you track how much ads are costing for products in your area, which allow you to identify jumps in spend by your competition. You also, of course, have the data about your own ad campaigns and how the CPM or CPC change over time so it’s important to use that for not just campaign optimization but competitive intelligence too.

Consumer Purchasing Activity. There is no shortage of data on consumer buying activity, ranging from data from credit card companies to dozens of government databases on consumer behavior. What data you need depends on your business, and unfortunately the best quality data you need to pay for from vendors. However, in the long term this is almost always worth the cost.

Price and Cost. It can be harder to find data on pricing and cost, but this data is even more important than activity since changes in price can be early indicators of future changes in activity. There are plenty of sources here as well including the Consumer Price Index and Commodity Prices Indexes, the latter actually has publicly trading securities that publish constant updates. In this pricing data, you are looking for any specific shifts in the areas that affect your business that can indicate competitive pricing moves or changes in your business costs.

Whatever data sources you choose to monitor, it’s critical that you make a habit of tracking them every month since many of these lack historical data access. If you don’t start tracking them now (and saving the data) you might not be able to go back in time and find it later!

How Automated Business Analysis can help

With so much market and competitive data available, finding the important insights can be difficult for teams of people. Luckily, Automated Business Analysis tools like Outlier can help! By adding competitive and market data as some of your integrations to Outlier you can immediately begin to receive competitive insights alongside your business insights. Even today, Outlier customers are monitoring:

App Store ranking data to identify any big changes in the app rankings by competitors

Weather data that might affect retail and restaurant sales

Competitive sales data (from the sources above)

That much data would be impossible for even the largest team of people, but the AI behind Outlier means you can avoid the work and focus on making decisions. Find marketing intelligence and perform competitive monitoring with these easy steps.

Join the ranks of marketers who have turned their data into a competitive advantage with Outlier. Want to know the impossible with your data?Sign up for a demo.